The differences in performance between normals and retardates on many memory tasks can be attributed to differences in the use of mnemonic strategies. Instructional programs designed to remove these group differences by means of strategy training have been successful in showing strategy maintenance but not generalization. Since most tests of strategy generalization have been limited to cases in which training is given in a single situation and the use of the strategy is tested in a very similar situation, the prospect of having to train a new strategy for every task is not as productive as training a more general mnemonic strategy which is appropriate for handling a number of different tasks. The proposed research attempts to fill in the gap in the knowledge regarding the ability of retardates to generalize a sophisticated general strategy. Since the ultimate test of any proposal about generality of a strategy is that teaching the strategy in one situation will promote the acquisition of that strategy in another situation, the transfer effects of training with our general mnemonic strategy will be examined in a number of different classroom-like tasks. These involve the learning of verbal concepts as well as the use of involuntary and automatic strategic processes such as which occur during reading and comprehension. Furthermore, the present proposal should provide information relevant to the teaching of this strategy by separating out those components of the instructional package responsible for producing successful generalization.